Organising work: the military and the division of labour
Gerard Hanlon analyses how the military is a central shaping force of both the contemporary and historical capitalist division of labour.
Standard explanations for the changing capitalist division of labour converge, crudely, around two perspectives. One is Smithian, in the sense that markets alter the division of labour because consumers seek more, different, or cheaper goods. Another, Marxian inspired, argues that exploitation and value extraction within production processes transform the division of labour. However, a third rationale is (re)emerging: geopolitical national-state competition, linked to a military project. This last explanation is often tinged with racism and/or Lebensraum (the pursuit of living space) – indeed, as a term, geopolitics itself is linked to both.
The geopolitical justification is obviously back, but often through quite benign renditions where security/domination is linked to the military defence of the state whilst also boosting new wealth forms – an often-technological military dividend – such as the internet, nuclear energy, jet engines, and so on. Here, the military drives innovation and technological change to move the economy forward – military spending ‘has significant untapped potential to be a new engine for growth’.
Nevertheless, as Edgerton highlights, these geopolitical analyses of the division of labour attribute innovation and technical change largely to civilian rather than military forces – e.g., a technological determinism often puts civilian forces in the driving seat at the expense of military domination. This weakens our understanding of the military’s influence. Here, I will demonstrate how militaries, and warfare states competing for security/domination, change the division of labour, alongside, if not instead of, markets or capital.
Using this lens, I want to add an organisational dimension to the military and the division of labour. I will do so by focusing on security and domination. By security, I mean the productive capacity that allows a state to defend its territory and/or citizens, and, by domination, I refer to the desire to dominate other states or dictate international relations. I suggest that security/domination are deeply implicated in organisational forms (different from, but also related to, technological forms). Indeed, I wish to suggest that many of the origins of capitalist organisation are to be found in this military infused security/domination, which has discipline and surveillance at its heart. By way of illustration, I use three military examples. Firstly, at the beginning of commercial capitalism, I examine the emergence of ‘industrial’ organisation in the military itself, secondly, through an analysis of the real subsumption of labour in the creation of mass production, and thirdly, a brief rendition of our own time and the emergence of what we might call a society of surveillance.
Producing military workers - the soldier
In the early modern period, European militaries standardised organisational structures to better discipline and control the labour process of war. During ‘the military revolution’ (1550-1650), the Dutch built the first modern European army of waged soldiers to gain tighter control, lessen strikes, ensure constant disciplined behaviours and develop an effort-wage bargain of ‘objectively verifiable standard[s] of regular work for regular pay’. This was all aimed at greater efficiency. Interestingly, control went beyond the immediate wage-effort bargain. Using pictorial manuals, officers trained soldiers into standardised surveilled routines. Training was designed to increase firing in regularised, sequenced spatial actions, learned quickly through drilling. These actions were then performed on battlefields but were centrally planned and managed from a distance.
The ‘countermarch’ is a classic example of this drilled uniformity. It created soldiers as ‘unit[s] of continuous production’ comparable with assembly lines. It moved combatants away from individuals with singular qualities such as bravery to automata and mere components of disciplined bodies. This practice generated constant musket-fire barrages wherein the soldiers in front fired and moved to the rear to reload and prepare to re-fire, as other soldiers edged forward in a continuous movement. Neither markets nor capitalist exploitation created this, rather the pursuit of military organisational efficiency to secure and dominate gave birth to it. Why? Because developing skilled pikemen and bowmen was expensive and slow and thereby limited war efficacy whereas, after relatively short training, disciplined soldiers followed orders, fired in sequence, and provided efficient organised violence built on speed as the prerequisite for war success, or Virilio’s dromological.
These organisational changes expanded military labour pools, secured labour in wage relations, increased control and surveillance, and developed centralised oversight from afar to reshape military social relations. Thus, before industrialisation, the military generated a factory organisation to build ‘the industrialisation of military behaviour’. Furthermore, it imposed waged labour on more people, itself key to capitalist development. Importantly, the Dutch were not alone. European militaries followed suite to industrialise large parts of military life, which culminated in the Napoleonic capacity for ‘total war’. Total war itself spread wages and market consumption throughout Europe. For example, in 1793, the French military had 650 000 soldiers needing wages, food, wine, uniforms, guns, and logistical support such as fodder, horses, etc. In short, the military imagined the future of capitalism.
Producing civilian workers - the proletariat
Post Napoleon, another rendition of this organisational control emerges with the creation of interchangeability, standardisation, and mass production in the US military (itself building on developments in European militaries). In the early nineteenth century, the US Ordnance Department was given the task, money, and time to develop an ‘American system of manufacture’ to deliver Henry Clay’s ‘American system of security’, by which he meant making America productively independent of foreign powers to better politically and economically compete with them.
Again, central to this were new organisational (and technological) forms such as the multi-divisional bureaucracy, which became the blueprint for the private railways so central to Chandler’s history of the corporation. In contrast to Chandler’s analysis, this form was actually foregrounded in the US military, not the civilian economy (see O'Connell). In pursuing this American security/domination, the US Ordnance Department managed networks of private and public arms manufacturers to build new production processes located in ever finer divisions of labour, deskilling technologies, and greater control of parts and people through interchangeability (the Royal Navy almost got there before the US during the Napoleonic wars). These 1840s military efforts culminated in supply chains wherein parts produced in two spatially separate armouries could be exchanged and interchangeably used to mass produce whole guns in both armouries – i.e., modern mass production supply chains in embryo. Again, this challenges the claim the civilian private sector led on organisational developments and the military followed. Rather, this suggests the military often organises the division of labour through public and private networks.
These early developments lessened US military dependence on skilled workers and shifted production from the formal to the real subsumption of labour. This entailed a move away from deriving absolute surplus value through lengthening the working day and/or adding employees but not interfering in the direct labour process, to radically altering the labour process e.g., via machines and deskilling, to thereby increase productivity and extract relative surplus value. Although not driven by pursuing relative surplus value as an end in itself, the military deployed organisational and technological innovations e.g., new work routines and technology – gauges – to subdue labour and organise production through real subsumption. This created the mass production of arms that were then shipped to the American frontier and used to colonise the US West and South. This broke military dependence on the craft labour needed to repair weapons and increased warfare’s velocity because damaged guns and parts no longer had to be transported to workers in the East. As a matter of strategy, the US military deliberately circulated these techniques to its public/private production network, which later developed mass production in a wide variety of industries – cars, bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, and electrical goods, that is, the first modern mass industries that, importantly, also created the mass consumer, or two military dividends. At the core of this was the military’s organisational need for control and surveillance. Furthermore, as Engels highlighted, because militaries compete, they also learn together so that these techniques spread throughout the major economies, thereby reshaping millions of working lives.
How might we demonstrate this? Well, the military circulation of mass production organisational knowledge is found in the 1850s Britain. The UK explicitly noted that if it did not imitate the US, it would fall behind in arms production. However, crucially, it also noted that without adopting these processes, it would fall behind in industrial production more broadly, thereby weakening its economy and hence its security/domination. Amongst other things, this encouraged Britain’s shift to machine led mass arms production. It did so by building highly mechanised factories such as the Enfield armoury, but also by demanding mass production techniques from its private arms suppliers. To give one example, the British Small Arms company (BSA) was developed to produce mass arms for the military (indeed, this split the British arms industry in two – a private consumer market for craft guns and a mass military market). BSA used this military led organisational mass production knowledge to become an early UK car manufacturer. As with the US military, the UK military also ensured the circulation of organisational techniques to diffuse these new processes to bicycles, electrical goods, sewing machines, etc. to thereby (re)shape Britain’s twentieth century civilian work organisation and its consumption processes.
Producing life - total surveillance
Can we see this military-infused social organisation today? Geopolitics can and does lead to conflict, as we are presently witnessing. However, for my purposes, I will continue with the argument that the military shapes contemporary work and indeed, consumption. We are obviously in a work revolution. The ‘on-demand’ economy is built on the real time matching of labour to consumer demand, which then compels workers to come to work, stay away from work, leave work, etc. because capital refuses to pay for labour that exceeds demand. This means that if someone does not consume in the immediate moment, others do not ‘work’ – Deliveroo, Uber, TaskRabbit, etc. being the most conspicuous, but by no means the only, examples. Equally, using data and GPS, Foursquare and others in retargeting markets bombard individuals to direct them towards nearby shops containing products they have historically liked and that are waiting to be purchased. Additionally, we are embedded in a world reduced to spectacle within which we are constantly available, constantly connected, constantly modulated.
Since the 2000s, our work and consumption worlds have changed – we are in an attention economy of consumerism, more flexible/precarious, more anxious, etc. A society many people experience as one of despotism and as a loss of control – itself always gendered, raced, classed, aged, and a lot more besides (just by way of example on this despotism as gendering, racist, classist, etc. see Lee et al). How did we get here? Once again, the military is central. To be remotely possible, this new world of work and consumption relies on data, IT, gadgets, the internet, virtual reality, 3D, etc. Importantly, this possibility has military origins. For example, the US military created the internet, semi-conductors, GPS, virtual reality – all central to our digital society. However, as Bellamy Foster and McChesney highlight, rather than simply being technological, the military-state has built this technology, once again, on the organisational principles of surveillance and control. One sees this in the Smartphone. The US Department of Defence (now the Dept of War) agency DARPA, via its Smart Module and Smart Matter programmes, prefigured the Smartphone, which allows employers and marketers reach and surveil employees and consumers in real time to thereby tell them to stay at home, come to work, or locate them in the retargeting market to inform them that their favourite Nike trainers are close by and waiting to be purchased.
But again, where did this emerge from? In short, the military – again via networks of military/public and civilian/private organisations – circulates knowledge and funding (the US spends roughly $1trillion on the military, of which 15 per cent is on R&D) that then organises work, consumption, and increasingly, life. This occurs at various levels – circulating personnel and knowledge between the public and private, military mission focused projects, increasing military spending on digital companies (e.g., Microsoft) for both R&D and digital infrastructure, developing dual purpose technologies, etc. For example, digital companies mine data for themselves and act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the military to secure/dominate in both internal and external jurisdictions. Or, Google, which purchased Keyhole from the US military start-up accelerator In-Q-Tel to create Google Earth, now provides locational services to the military to target people and infrastructure. Furthermore, the new lifeblood of society, data, entrenches power elites who increasingly organise society on the organisationally exploitative patterns outlined above.
Finally, as US hegemony wanes, geopolitics simultaneously concentrates and disperses power because it increases competition between warfare states within ‘digital economies’. Through the long-established traditions of mimicking and circulating knowledge, this digital economy centralises security/domination. As Gjesvik highlights, China has created digital independence through Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, etc; the US has tried to dominate global digital infrastructures through Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.; the EU is scrambling to create digital independence via Mistral, digital euros, satellites, etc. and you and I are subsumed and dominated by the digital economy of work and consumption. Security/domination is everywhere, but individually it goes unnoticed because your smartphone makes life liveable – as seamlessly as breathing. Not for nothing Weber suggested discipline starts in the military (see Economy and Society, pages 1150-55).
Explaining security/domination and the division of labour
How might we think about the role of security/domination in shaping capitalist divisions of labour? One necessary, but insufficient, way is through Foucault. He suggests early modern states transition to the capitalist economy through pursuing security/domination both internally and externally. Internally, what he calls ‘the police-state’ controls both population management (biopolitics) and discipline (panopticons). Emerging police-state functions such as coordinating markets, inspection, contracting practices, etc. were designed to secure states through the maximisation of production. Such functions focused on circulating people, ideas and resources to secure states embedded in geopolitical competition. This generates an internal infrastructure of movement: standards, regulations, norms, etc. cultivating flows of people, knowledge, and materials for economic development (and also, although not central to Foucault’s analysis, external circulations like slavery). Here, the police-state regulates ‘what men do; it is interested in their activity, their “occupation”’ to thereby grow the state’s ‘ability to administer itself’ through quality control, standardisation, forecasts, statistics, and measure.
Foucault suggests that this early police-state is replaced by markets, which come to manage populations. Elsewhere, I argue Foucault is mistaken and that the police-state remains, but is split into two – one, the modern police of, say, Western Europe (itself dominating and discipling populations) and two, the military-state, which continues to internally manage and discipline labour via work organisation e.g., mass production, or the on-demand economy. In short, Foucault downplayed geopolitics in his work on neoliberalism and thus eroded the police(military)-state and security/domination. However, today’s surveillance society is located in military security/domination, as was mass production, and indeed the ‘factory before the factory’ (the countermarch, the ship, the plantation, etc.)
Beyond Foucault, this military-state influence on work organisation is often ignored within Marxism (though with important exceptions in Engels, David Noble, Jim Glassman, Lazzarato and Alliez, etc.), and more damningly, peaceable Smithian liberal market theory. If what is outlined above is accurate, it appears that security/domination and the military-state shape work and organisation in important ways and that these are not simply the result of profit maximisation led consumption or capitalistically exploitative labour processes – although deeply embedded in both. Instead, social organisation appears to be partly driven (in)directly by the military (in networks of public and private producers) via the control and surveillance of labour to ensure geopolitical security/domination. Once achieved, this organisational knowledge is circulated to wider private capital as control. In short, returning to Neumann, capital accumulation constructed on geopolitics (e.g., the need for resources, minerals, labour and /or land) has long been central to capitalism and, importantly, this guarantees the military remains focused on labour. How then might we better understand the role of market and exploitation? Well, necro-economics and primitive accumulation will help, but they might be another blog.
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Gerard Hanlon is Professor of Organisational Sociology at Queen Mary School of Business and Management and a member of CLaSP. His recent work examines the ongoing role of the military in organising capitalist production. This blog is based on two of his recent papers, Organising Force and The Military Dream of Society.